Unlike the penultimate track from Ninja Sex Party’s 2018 album Cool Patrol, I am not here today to tell you a tale of a “Mansion Party.” Instead, what I’m here to discuss is a delightful (if initially hectic) indie game entitled Potion Party. This title, from developer and publisher RPGames, is a game designed for one to four players in which you’re tasked with running your own potion shop.

Your ultimate goal is to become a master alchemist, which you’ll have accomplished once you’ve perfected all the game’s various mechanics. The game features a story mode that introduces you to these mechanics piece by piece to allow you to get the hang of things without overwhelming you too quickly.

The story mode is composed of several stages, each of which has varying time limits. Your primary objective in each story chapter is to make a certain amount of gold within the time limit by selling your potions. However, the story mode will also teach you how to make more advanced concoctions beyond those that simply require one of the three primary-colored plants at your disposal. Mastering the secondary mechanics beyond that is optional, but recommended for efficiency’s sake.

As an example of what I mean by “secondary mechanics,” there are three types of enemies you’ll have to contend with throughout the course of the story. These enemies take the forms of ghosts, slimes, and thieves. Of these, I find that ghosts are the easiest to avoid. They simply streak across the screen in a straight line before disappearing and all you have to do is move out of their path. If you happen to collide with a ghost as it moves past, it will invert your controls for a few seconds.

Slimes are the most annoying in my experience, but they thankfully don’t actively cause trouble. All they do is remain in place and significantly slow your walking speed if you collide with them or attempt to move through them. Unlike ghosts, they don’t disappear if you don’t actively clear them out, however. Slimes can be dealt with by pouring a powder on them that is the same color as the slime itself. I’ll explain how that works more thoroughly in a bit.

Finally, there are the thieves from the eponymous “thieves guild.” When a thief appears in your potion shop, the worst thing I’ve found that they do is run through the shop, grab any item you’ve got sitting on a table (like a potion or ingredient), and attempt to make off with it. Thieves can be taken care of by simply pouring a bucket of water on them as if they take the concept of hydrophobia to its logical extreme. If a thief is carrying something of yours when you deal with them, the item will simply fall to the floor, rather than being lost alongside the thief.

When you start Potion Party’s first story mode stage, you’ll find that things are rather simple. You initially have the following items at your disposal: a bucket, a water well, three distinct plants, a mortar and pestle, a brewing station, and some vials. To start things off, you must carry the bucket to the water well and collect water, which you’ll pour onto all three plants to start them growing. After you do that, I would advise also carrying some water to the brewing station so that you can get it started boiling ahead of time. Also, if the station’s burners aren’t lit, you won’t be able to brew any potions.

When a customer enters your shop, they’ll immediately tell you what sort of potion they’d like and how long they’re willing to wait around for you to brew it. You can tell exactly which potion your customer wants by looking at two specific, yet simple aspects: the color of the potion itself, and the size of the vial in which it is contained. I’ll come back to what I mean by that in a bit, but first, I’d like to explain the usual potion-brewing process.

Once a plant has finished growing after you’ve watered it, you can put it in your mortar and pestle for a few seconds to turn it into a powder. Depending on what sort of potion your current customer has requested that you brew for them, you may be able to place that powder directly into the brewing station and then place down an appropriately sized vial to begin the brewing process. For example, suppose your current customer would like a simple, regular-sized red potion.

To make this, you would put the red plant into your mortar and pestle to create a red powder, then place that powder into an active (that is, boiling) brewing station while making sure there’s an empty, appropriately sized vial at the end of the brewing station. Once you’ve met all these requirements, a red potion will brew over the next few seconds. You can then pick up the finished potion and hand it directly to your customer in exchange for a certain amount of gold. This process is exactly the same for the other two primary-colored potions you can make, blue and yellow.

Alternatively, if your customer requests a multicolored potion (that is, green, purple, or orange), you’ll have to take a couple of extra steps during the brewing process. Suppose you need to make a purple potion for your current customer. You can go about this by either creating red and blue powder and combining them at this stage to make purple powder, (which you would then brew normally), or you can brew individual red and blue potions and subsequently combine those into a finished purple potion.

In all honesty, I found out about the first of these methods completely by accident. I initially thought combining fully-brewed potions was the only way to create multicolored concoctions. While I’m on this topic, I want to detail one of the select few complaints I have about the game. The issue in question is that the game really doesn’t offer much in the way of a tutorial. There’s a fairly bare-bones “how to play” section on the main menu, but all that does is provide a slew of arrows and symbols which didn’t make any sense to me before I actually started playing the story.

Admittedly, the game’s efforts to explain certain mechanics do improve a bit once you’re actually in the middle of some gameplay. For instance, the game tells you through those same symbols and arrows that placing any plant in a furnace will create coal, and combining coal with any single-colored potion is the only way to create frequently-requested black potions. Having said all that, I suspect you’ll have to figure out quite a lot of the core gameplay loop on your own through trial and error.

To be brutally honest, when I first started playing Potion Party and recording footage of it for this article, I thought the core gameplay loop was going to be too hectic for my tastes and abilities simply because of that lack of an introductory tutorial. I entered the first stage of the story to find an arrow pointing to my bucket, but no indication as to what I was meant to do with this information. I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit how long it took me to figure everything out.

However, once I managed to get the hang of things, I found myself developing a sort of “rhythm” that really helped me progress and enjoy the game without feeling quite so overwhelmed. I would begin by asking myself if all three plants were watered, if the burners on the alchemy station were lit, and how many potions of each type I could begin preparing if a customer happened to order them. I would then simply repeat this process as many times as I needed to throughout each level of the story.

Giving myself this “checklist” of sorts played a pivotal role in helping me remember all the various aspects of the gameplay loop. That’s because I’ve found that some things are kind of easy to overlook until they actively become a hindrance to you. As an example, I sometimes forgot to light the burners on my alchemy station and wondered why my current potion wasn’t brewing until the customer who requested it decided I was taking too long and walked out. Thus, I find it helps significantly to make mental notes of everything you need to keep tabs on throughout each stage of the story mode.

There are a couple more aspects of Potion Party’s gameplay I would like to mention in some detail before I conclude this review. The first of these is that, after a certain stage in the story, you’ll sometimes have to brew what is known as “huge potions.” As the name implies, these are simply larger quantities of your potions that are contained in larger vials.

When brewing a huge potion, the most annoying thing you’ll notice is that you’ll have to re-light your alchemy station’s burners halfway through the process. However, this temporary pause also allows you to add any different ingredients you’ll need to, say, brew a huge multicolored potion without having to go about this in a more meticulous manner.

Secondly, I mentioned earlier that your primary goal throughout each stage of the story is to make enough gold from selling potions in order to progress. I think it’s worth noting that even if you don’t quite accomplish this at first or if you elect to close your shop early so that you can restart the stage, you get to keep all the money you earn from each attempt. I personally think this is quite a nice touch, especially if you’re trying to save up for an upgrade to your shop that’ll help you reach your gold-earning goals.

That leads me to the final noteworthy aspect of Potion Party that I’d like to detail. There’s quite a bit you can do with the gold you earn from selling potions during each stage of the story. You can spend it on things like upgrades for your potion shop (such as additional mortar-and-pestle stations, furnaces, or brewing stations). Alternatively, you can spend your gold on things that, for example, increase the amount of time customers will wait for you to brew their requested potions before leaving your shop, or grant you additional amounts of gold for each potion you sell.

You can also drop portions of your earnings on unlocking and upgrading entirely new playable characters, each of whom has unique bonuses that can be improved by spending additional gold on them. Your starting character, Abel, has no such special abilities, but can still capably do everything necessary to keep the potion shop running. However, if you want to play as a character who causes you to passively earn extra gold per potion you sell, or who can brew potions more quickly, or who is completely immune to enemy effects, it’s worth bearing in mind that you have options.

Overall, having spent as much time with Potion Party as I have, I can clearly see why it’s designed for up to four players. If you’re flying solo, as I have been thus far, you may find that things can become more than a bit hectic since you don’t have any allies with you who can attend to certain things while you’re busy and vice-versa. If you feel this way when playing Potion Party though, I would offer the following advice: don’t worry, keep at it, and try new things. You never know what you might discover.

A PC review key of Potion Party was provided by RPGames for this review.

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Potion Party

$9.99

8

Score

8.0/10

Pros

• Quite Enjoyable Core Gameplay Loop

Cons

• Gameplay Can Be Hectic When Playing Solo
• No In-Depth Tutorial